Eradicating ecocide could create conditions for business to flourish, but company leaders often offer knee-jerk response to environment campaigners

Thursday, 21, February 2013 – Guardian Sustainable Business – The Eradicating Ecocide campaign calls for ecocide – the extensive destruction of ecosystems – to be recognised in international law as the fifth crime against Peace. Lawyer Polly Higgins’ compelling argument is that the abolition of ecocide requires business leadership as surely as the campaign for the abolition of slavery did.

One of the paradoxes for environmental campaigners in developed nations is that we are often fighting for the rights of others – for other species, people in other nations, people not yet born. Like the abolitionists we may not personally benefit from our victories and indeed may be disadvantaged in the short-term. This produces a complex moral and psychological field to work in, one that frequently produces unintended consequences like my conversation with the business leaders. Angry denial, studied indifference and projection of blame are just a few of the responses that leave campaigners shell-shocked and puzzled as they struggle to engage both the public and the powerful in the struggle for a truly sustainable future…. http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/eradicating-ecocide-business-leaders-challenge

▶ SHOULD COMPANIES COMPENSATE SOCIETY FOR ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION FROM WHICH THEY PROFIT? http://sco.lt/5x2tqz

Recent spikes in prices of rice, soy, wheat and corn have driven many poor people in developing countries into hunger and malnutrition. In 2011, then World Bank president Robert Zoellick estimated that 44 million people fell into poverty in 2010 due to rising food prices, adding, “Food price inflation is the biggest threat today to the world’s poor…one weather event and you start to push people over the edge.”

The dots connecting world hunger, weather events and speculation on global financial markets are obvious. Yet, well-meaning officials at UN agencies, including the FAO, World Bank and IMF, are curiously blind. Instead, their many urgent meetings over the past three years have focused on raising more money to pay these rising prices for food staples, urging more productivity from agriculture and opposing nations curbing exports to protect their domestic foods …. MORE A VIP READ: The Economics of Curbing Speculation In Food, Water and Vital Resources

“The archeological record indicates that civilizational collapse does not come suddenly out of the blue. Archeologists analyzing earlier civilizations talk about a decline-and-collapse scenario. Economic and social collapse was almost always preceded by a period of environmental decline….

“No previous civilization has survived the ongoing destruction of its natural supports. Nor will ours. Yet economists look at the future through a different lens. Relying heavily on economic data to measure progress, they see the near 10-fold growth in the world economy since 1950 and the associated gains in living standards as the crowning achievement of our modern civilization….More….Two Views of Our Future: Science Versus Mainstream Economics : TreeHugger.

Mt. Shasta, a small northern California town of 3,500 residents nestled in the foothills of magnificent Mount Shasta, is taking on corporate power through an unusual process—democracy.

The citizens of Mt. Shasta have developed an extraordinary ordinance, set to be voted on in the next special or general election, that would prohibit corporations such as Nestle and Coca-Cola from extracting water from the local aquifer. But this is only the beginning. The ordinance would also ban energy giant PG&E, and any other corporation, from regional cloud seeding, a process that disrupts weather patterns through the use of toxic chemicals such as silver iodide. More generally, it would refuse to recognize corporate personhood, explicitly place the rights of community and local government above the economic interests of multinational corporations, and recognize the rights of nature to exist, flourish, and evolve.

Mt. Shasta is not alone. Rather, it is part of a (so far) quiet municipal movement making its way across the United States in which communities are directly defying corporate rule and affirming the sovereignty of local government.

The conflict between humankind and nature has never been as serious as it is today

The Great Disruption offers a stark and unflinching look at the challenge humanity faces – yet also a deeply optimistic message. The coming decades will see loss, suffering, and conflict as our planetary overdraft is paid; however, they will also bring out the best in humanity can offer; compassion, innovation, resilience, and adaptability

Economic progress does not have to come at the expense of environmental health.

A new UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) report imagines a future where agriculture is no longer a main emitter of greenhouse gases (GHGs)—agriculture emits anywhere from 13 to 30 percent of total GHGs worldwide. Greening agriculture, states the report, could change agriculture to “a GHG sink, while reducing deforestation and freshwater use by 55 percent and 35 percent.

Like this:

Tojo, Indonesia: A villager walks through a burnt forest after a slash and burn practice to open the land for agriculture. Photograph: Yusuf Ahmad/Reuters

Britain and other countries face a collapse of their economies and loss of culture if they do not protect the environment better, the world’s leading champion of nature has warned.

“What we are seeing today is a total disaster,” said Ahmed Djoghlaf, the secretary-general of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. “No country has met its targets to protect nature. We are losing biodiversity at an unprecedented rate. If current levels [of destruction] go on we will reach a tipping point very soon. The future of the planet now depends on governments taking action in the next few years.” (read article)

A decade ago, Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen first suggested we were living in the “Anthropocene,” a new geological epoch in which humans had altered the planet. Now, in an article for Yale Environment 360, Crutzen and a coauthor explain why adopting this term could help transform the perception of our role as stewards of the Earth.

by paul j. crutzen and christian schwägerl

It’s a pity we’re still officially living in an age called the Holocene. The Anthropocene — human dominance of biological, chemical and geological processes on Earth — is already an undeniable reality. Evidence is mounting that the name change suggested by one of us more than ten years ago is overdue. It may still take some time for the scientific body in charge of naming big stretches of time in Earth’s history, the International Commission on Stratigraphy, to make up its mind about this name change. But that shouldn’t stop us from seeing and learning what it means to live in this new Anthropocene epoch, on a planet that is being anthroposized at high speed. …. more

SEE ALSO

Measuring What Matters: GDP, Ecosystems and the Environment

A New Indicator: Valuing Natural Capital

“For the past 50 years, growth in GDP has been an overall policy objective pursued by governments at every level. Obsession with GDP growth has spurred policies to liquidate natural capital as quickly as possible. By correctly valuing changes in our stocks of natural capital and the ecosystem services that they provide will help advance a science of new metrics capable of inspiring more sustainable policy choices.” (Read on…Measuring What Matters: GDP, Ecosystems and the Environment | World Resources Institute.

The collective duty of humanity is to seek a balance with nature.

Everyone has to do their part; be more with less. The problem is not money, says Brazilian Leonardo Boff in this exclusive Tierramérica interview.

“The market is not going to resolve the environmental crisis,” says Boff, professor at Brazil’s State University of Rio de Janeiro. The solution, he says, lies in ethics and in changing our relationship with nature.READ ON: Tierramérica.

The main cause of climate change is capitalism. As people who inhabit Mother Earth, we have the right to say that the cause is capitalism, to protest limitless growth. … More than 800 million people live on less than $2 per day. Until we change the capitalist system, our measures to address climate change are limited.” (read rest of article…

To support outer efforts towards sustainability we need to radically adjust our inner attitudes toward the material world. Relationships based on greed, over-identification with ownership, and the use of material goods to establish status and power over others, can be traded for new values and ways of living that empower a healthy and dignified relationship to all the earth’s resources.

“Dreaming the future can create the future. We stand at the threshold of a singular opportunity in the human experiment: To re-imagine how to live on Earth in ways that honor the web of life, each other and future generations. It’s a revolution from the heart of nature — and the human heart.

“We also stand at the brink of worldwide ecological and civilizational collapse. We face a reckoning from the treacherous breach in our relationship with nature. We’ve been acting like a rock star trashing a hotel room, and it’s the morning after. But this hotel is planet Earth. The guest rules are non-negotiable. If we don’t change our ways fast, management may vote us off the island. (More.,..)

In the last few years richer countries like China, India, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia have been buying up huge tracts of productive farmland and oil rich acres in poor countries like Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Zambia. These deals are usually in the millions of acres and often come with 99 year lease terms.It’s modern colonialism.

Many economists are failing to assess the value of their countries’ natural resources, putting billion’s of people’s well-being at risk and contributing to catastrophic species loss, according to a new United Nations Environment Programme report. http://ow.ly/Cz38

The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity

The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) study is a major international initiative to draw attention to the global economic benefits of biodiversity, to highlight the growing costs of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation, and to draw together expertise from the fields of science, economics and policy to enable practical actions moving forward.

In the rush to portray the perils of climate change, many other serious issues have been largely ignored. Climate change has become the poster child of environmental crises, complete with its own celebrities and campaigners. But is it so serious that we can afford to overlook the rise of infectious disease, the collapse of fisheries, the ongoing loss of forests and biodiversity, and the depletion of global water supplies?
The Other Inconvenient Truth: The Crisis in Global Land Use by Jonathan Foley: Yale Environment 360.

People should use the climate change crisis as an opportunity to become human again, setting aside the addictive and self-destructive behaviour that has damaged their souls, the Archbishop of Canterbury said today.

Dr Rowan Williams, head of the Church of England and leader of the worldwide Anglican communion, told an audience at Southwark Cathedral that people had allowed themselves to become “addicted to fantasies about prosperity and growth, dreams of wealth without risk and profit without cost”.

The consequences of such a lifestyle meant the human soul was “one of the foremost casualties of environmental degradation”.